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Showing posts from December, 2018

Weekly Update - December 29, 2018: Winding down the year

No big round-up this week, as most of the tech world is on holiday, and I'm working on my end-of-2018 round up which I'll post on January 1st. There was a little bit of news this week: You can start the new year with a 30-day activity challenge in the Google Fit app . It starts January 1st, but you can sign up today.  Get Google Fit for your Android phon e to get started. Google celebrated their Webmaster Product Experts . If you are a webmaster who enjoys sharing your expertise, check it out.   The camera on your phone is getting smarter. Google uses computer vision techniques and machine learning to power features like  "Top Shot" on the Pixel 3 that saves and analyzes frames before and after your shutter press  to capture just the right moment. And  Google Lens lets you "search what you see"  and copy text in images. Follow the links to learn how it works.  Speaking of "smart" image processing, if you are a dog person, rather than a cat

Weekly Update - December 22, 2018: Google+, YouTube, Christmas Fun

We’ve passed the darkest day of the year, and so, hopefully, no more bad news for at least a few weeks. This week there is more information for Plussers, new features for YouTubers, and more. Plus some holiday fun! If you celebrate Christmas, may it be merry! There is now a timeline for the shutdown of the Google+ API . While it will stop working entirely on March 7th , there may be “intermittent failures” as early as January 28th. If you are a blog owner or webmaster, it’s time to remove any Google+ plugins such as Google+ badges, +1, share or follow buttons, and embedded posts. The API will also stop working for social media management services like Buffer and Hootsuite.  Romain Vialard has s hared instructions for exporting all the data from a Google+ Community and importing into Firebase .  The New York Times reported that Facebook “gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempt

Update on the Google+ API for developers and website owners

Update March 10, 2019: The Google+ API has shut down, and buttons, badges and embedded posts no longer display. If you have code for these on your website or blog, now is the time to remove it. Update February 28: See the latest update with changes that may mitigate the effects for some developers. The Google+ API will shut down on March 7 with "intermittent failures" starting as early as January 28. The  "sunsetting" of Google+ for consumers is scheduled for April 201 9, so it will outlive the API by a few weeks . Google has updated the Google+ Platform Developer site with more details about the shutdown of the platform over the coming months. The Google+ APIs will be completely shut down and cease to function March 7, 2019. There may be "intermittent failures" as early as January 28th. This will not only affect developers, but also website owners who have added Google+ integration features to their site.  And if you use social media management

Weekly Update - December 15, 2018: Google+, YouTube, advertising

This week there was more bad news, with the announcement that Google will speed up the shutdown of Google+. There were also some positive updates for YouTube Creators, so there’s that. This week started with the unwelcome announcement that in November a change to the Google+ API could have revealed the private information of 52.5 million users. They have subsequently decided to shut down the Google+ API within 90 days, and sunset the consumer version of Google+ in April, rather than August. Despite the accelerated shutdown Google+ unfortunately hasn’t provided us consumer users (or developers) any details about what’s going to happen exactly over the coming months.  Meanwhile Google+-friendly social media management platform Friends+Me has been actively developing a Google+ Exporter, which allows you to download your Google+ posts in a format that can be imported into WordPress or Blogger . The free version lets you download up to 3000 posts. I haven’t tried it personally, but it

YouTube Partners: assess whether your content is advertiser-friendly to run ads

YouTube has launched a "Video Self-Certification" pilot program that allows some YouTube Partners to rate their own videos against the advertiser-friendly  content guidelines when they upload. YouTube has also provided examples of non-advertiser friendly content, so all Partners can more easily determine if a particular video should be monetized. Assessing Advertiser-Friendliness If your YouTube channel is in the YouTube Partner Program, you are expected to make sure that your content complies with the  Community Guidelines , the  AdSense Program Policies ,  and also is "advertiser-friendly". Some content may be allowed under the Community Guidelines, but might not be something advertisers want to be associated with. If that's the case, YouTube recommends you turn off ads on that video. If YouTube detects that a video is probably not advertiser-friendly, you will see a yellow monetization icon in your video manager, which indicates it is probably not s

Weekly Update - December 8, 2018: Hangouts, Allo, YouTube

I thought December would be a quiet month, but people were talking this week about Hangouts and Google’s chat app strategy, Tumblr’s sudden ban on adult content and much more. At the beginning of this week 9to5Google kicked off a storm by reporting that 2019 would be the last year you could use Hangouts , based on information from an unnamed source. This provoked a response from Scott Johnston , product lead for Hangouts, who called it shoddy reporting. Google subsequently released an article with an overview their messaging services strategy . The bottom line: “classic” Hangouts users will eventually be transitioned to Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, which are designed for enterprise and are currently only available to G Suite users. There is no timeline for when that will happen, and “ Google is fully committed to supporting classic Hangouts users until everyone is successfully migrated to Chat and Meet. ”  But while Hangouts will still be around, Google also announced that “sm

Weekly Update - December 1, 2018: Google Fi, YouTube Stories and more

I’m dreaming of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere! As we head into the last month of the year, there was a major announcement from Project Fi, plus some nice updates from YouTube and more. The big news this week was that “Project Fi” - Google’s mobile network that launched in 2015 - has graduated to “Google Fi” and now officially supports most newer Android phones and iPhones. There is a catch: Fi’s unique technology to seamlessly switch between multiple cellular network and new enhanced network features only work with “designed for Fi” phones. If you are interested, you should check compatibility of your phone .And if you decide to give it a try, u se my referral link and we’ll both get a bonus ( click here ). To celebrate the launch, Fi offered an amazing one-day-only promo : buy a new phone through Google, meet the other eligibility requirements, and you would receive the full value of the phone back in travel gift cards. It was so popular support was almost impossible